Peopling of Br N Am

by Bernard Bailyn

Book Overview

In this introduction to his large-scale work The Peopling of British North America, Bernard Bailyn identifies central themes in a formative passage of our history: the transatlantic transfer of people from the Old World to the North American continent that formed the basis of American society. Voyagers to the West, which covers the British migration in the years just before the American Revolution and is the first major volume in the Peopling project,...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394553926
• ISBN13: 9780394553924
• Release Date: May 1986
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Length: 188 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.

Customer Reviews

an elegant little classic

It's unusual for an academic history book to be spellbinding, but this one is. Bailyn's slim, elegant volume contains three lectures (originally given at the University of Wisconsin and in other venues) on immigration and demography in early America. Bailyn argues that immigration from Europe to North America is best understood as an extension of the pre-existing patterns of local and long-distance migration within medieval and early modern Europe. In the final lecture, "A Domesday Book for the Periphery," Bailyn further argues that the diverse and disorderly culture of early America is best understood as a "marchland" (112) of European civilization. The lectures are studded with intriguing data and specific, moving examples. If you want to do in-depth research on this topic, you will need to read Bailyn's longer work, Voyagers to the West, but the ample footnotes in this volume will be enough to get you started on further reading. Truly a classic in the field.

Historically "Falsifiable" Response to a PIG

The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, by Thomas E. Woods, is such a tissue of bare assertions, errors, omissions, and ideological polemics that I feel a urgent need to provide readers with the sort of substantial historiography that Woods ignores and dismisses as mere "politically correct" liberal propaganda. In his presumption, Woods declares that the vast body of historical scholarship, from virtually all the universities of the USA is "as distorted as the histories imposed on the hapless people of the former Soviet Union." Frankly, that's absurd, and Woods's 240 page rebuttal of thousands of scholars and scholarly books is an embarrassment. The books of Bernard Bailyn (b. 1922) are far more modest in their claims. Bailyn has been a professor of colonial American history at Harvard since the 1960s, when I studied with him there. Twice winner of the Pulitzer prize in history, Bailyn is as respected a scholar as any in the USA, and he's certainly nobody's propagandist. His writing is concise and elegant, and his books are never ponderously long. His research is focused and impartial, and every word he writes represents his conditional understanding of source materials, rather than any pre-formed sociological dogma. Here are some of his available titles, starting with this book, The Peopling of British North America: *Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours *Education in the Forming of American Society *The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution *To Begin Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders *The Origins of American Politics Virtually every tendentious assertion in Woods's PIG is forcefully demolished somewhere in one of those texts. However, in order to give people more specific choices, here are the titles of the first five chapters of the PIG, together with books that lay Woods's proclamations to rest: Chapter 1: The Colonial Origins of American Liberty (Woods says "The Puritans didn't steal their land from the Indians." That's a disingenuous statement that leaves him plenty of wiggle room, but it's more false than true. I've included several titles concerning New England relation with indigenous peoples.) *David Hackett Fischer - Albion's Seed *Woody Holton - Forced Founders *Allan Gallay - The Indian Slave Trade *Jill Lepore - The Name of War *Rafael Demos - The Unredeemed Captive *Richard White - The Middle Ground Philip Greven - The Protestant Temperament Chapter 2 - America's Conservative Revolution (Woods declares that "the colonists were conservatives," thereby dismissing or ignoring a very large and influential number of the advocates of independence who were social and economic radicals. He also states with reservation that "The American Revolution was NOOT like the French Revolution." Not at all? Not in any way? that's outright silliness.) *Kevin Phillips - The Cousin's War *RR Palmer - The Age of the Democratic Revolution *David Hackett Fischer - Paul Revere's Ride *Gordon Wood - The r

The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction

The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction writtin by Bernard Bailyn is a book that has three major essays about how North America was settled. These essays are: Worlds in Motion, The Rings of Saturn and A Domesday Book for the Periphery. In these essays the author brings a new vividness and authenticity to the story of the settlement of North America as the Old World tranfers people to the New World... we see a basis for an American society begining to form... later a British migration solidifies a central theme where people wanted to control their own destiny.The book is well-written and is documented giving the reader sharp detail. I found the book to be not only educational, but enlightening.

Concise Introduction to Massive Project

This compact work introduces Bernard Bailyn's multi-volume population history of America. This work offers a colorful portrait of settlement throughout British North America before the American Revolution. Various regions and colonies are considered in detail. For a contrasting consideration of British East Florida, see the relevant essay in The African American Heritage of Florida.

great book

this is a brief but fascinating read. although it contains in itself a great deal of interesting material, it really makes you anxious to read the subsequent volume,"Voyagers To The West."